Militarism and International Relations : Political economy, security, theory, edited by Anna Stavrianakis and Jan Selby, Abingdon, Routledge, 2012, 212 pp., £80.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-61491-7

An engaging narrative is maintained throughout this edited collection of articles that address the issue of militarism in international relations. The book seamlessly integrates historical and contemporary perspectives on militarism with theory and relevant international case studies, resulting in a very informative read. The work is comprised of three parts. Part 1 deals with the theorisation of militarism and includes chapters by Anna Stavrianakis and Jan Selby, Martin Shaw, Simon Dalby, and Nicola Short. It covers a range of topics relating to historical and contemporary theories of militarism, geopolitical threat construction, political economy, and the US military’s ‘cultural turn’.

Usability and security of gaze-based graphical grid passwords

We present and analyze several gaze-based graphical password schemes based on recall and cued-recall of grid points; eye-trackers are used to record user's gazes, which can prevent shoulder-surfing and may be suitable for users with disabilities. Our 22-subject study observes that success rate and entry time for the grid-based schemes we consider are comparable to other gaze-based graphical password schemes. We propose the first password security metrics suitable for analysis of graphical grid passwords and provide an in-depth security analysis of user-generated passwords from our study, observing that, on several metrics, user-generated graphical grid passwords are substantially weaker than uniformly random passwords, despite our attempts at designing schemes to improve quality of user-generated passwords.

A proposed Australian industrial control system security curriculum

The security of industrial control systems in critical infrastructure is a concern for the Australian government and other nations. There is a need to provide local Australian training and education for both control system engineers and information technology professionals. This paper proposes a postgraduate curriculum of four courses to provide knowledge and skills to protect critical infrastructure industrial control systems. Our curriculum is unique in that it provides security awareness but also the advanced skills required for security specialists in this area. We are aware that in the Australian context there is a cultural gap between the thinking of control system engineers who are responsible for maintaining and designing critical infrastructure and information technology professionals who are responsible for protecting these systems from cyber attacks. Our curriculum aims to bridge this gap by providing theoretical and practical exercises that will raise the awareness and preparedness of both groups of professionals.

Visualising security incidents through event aggregation

Extracting and aggregating the relevant event records relating to an identified security incident from the multitude of heterogeneous logs in an enterprise network is a difficult challenge. Presenting the information in a meaningful way is an additional challenge. This paper looks at solutions to this problem by first identifying three main transforms; log collection, correlation, and visual transformation. Having identified that the CEE project will address the first transform, this paper focuses on the second, while the third is left for future work. To aggregate by correlating event records we demonstrate the use of two correlation methods, simple and composite. These make use of a defined mapping schema and confidence values to dynamically query the normalised dataset and to constrain result events to within a time window. Doing so improves the quality of results, required for the iterative re-querying process being undertaken. Final results of the process are output as nodes and edges suitable for presentation as a network graph.

The Australian Business Assessment of Computer User Security (ABACUS): A national survey.

The Australian Business Assessment of Computer User Security (ABACUS) survey is a nationwide assessment of the prevalence and nature of computer security incidents experienced by Australian businesses. This report presents the findings of the survey which may be used by businesses in Australia to assess the effectiveness of their information technology security measures.

Background to the development of a curriculum for the history of “cyber” and “communications” security

For any discipline to be regarded as a professional undertaking by which its members may be treated as true “professionals” in a specific area, practitioners must clearly understand that discipline’s history as well as the place and significance of that history in current practice as well as its relevance to available technologies and artefacts at the time. This is common for many professional disciplines such as medicine, pharmacy, engineering, law and so on but not yet, this paper submits, in information technology. Based on twenty five elapsed years of experience in developing and delivering Cybersecurity courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, this paper proposes a rationale and set of differing perspectives for the planning and development of curricula relevant to the delivery of appropriate courses in the history of cybersecurity or information assurance to information and communications technology (ICT) students and thus to potential information technology professionals.

Iris based identity verification robust to sample presentation security attacks

Iris based identity verification is highly reliable but it can also be subject to attacks. Pupil dilation or constriction stimulated by the application of drugs are examples of sample presentation security attacks which can lead to higher false rejection rates. Suspects on a watch list can potentially circumvent the iris based system using such methods. This paper investigates a new approach using multiple parts of the iris (instances) and multiple iris samples in a sequential decision fusion framework that can yield robust performance. Results are presented and compared with the standard full iris based approach for a number of iris degradations. An advantage of the proposed fusion scheme is that the trade-off between detection errors can be controlled by setting parameters such as the number of instances and the number of samples used in the system. The system can then be operated to match security threat levels. It is shown that for optimal values of these parameters, the fused system also has a lower total error rate.

Cryptographic techniques for managing computational effort

Availability has become a primary goal of information security and is as significant as other goals, in particular, confidentiality and integrity. Maintaining availability of essential services on the public Internet is an increasingly difficult task in the presence of sophisticated attackers. Attackers may abuse limited computational resources of a service provider and thus managing computational costs is a key strategy for achieving the goal of availability. In this thesis we focus on cryptographic approaches for managing computational costs, in particular computational effort. We focus on two cryptographic techniques: computational puzzles in cryptographic protocols and secure outsourcing of cryptographic computations. This thesis contributes to the area of cryptographic protocols in the following ways. First we propose the most efficient puzzle scheme based on modular exponentiations which, unlike previous schemes of the same type, involves only a few modular multiplications for solution verification; our scheme is provably secure. We then introduce a new efficient gradual authentication protocol by integrating a puzzle into a specific signature scheme. Our software implementation results for the new authentication protocol show that our approach is more efficient and effective than the traditional RSA signature-based one and improves the DoSresilience of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol, the most widely used security protocol on the Internet. Our next contributions are related to capturing a specific property that enables secure outsourcing of cryptographic tasks in partial-decryption. We formally define the property of (non-trivial) public verifiability for general encryption schemes, key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs), and hybrid encryption schemes, encompassing public-key, identity-based, and tag-based encryption avors. We show that some generic transformations and concrete constructions enjoy this property and then present a new public-key encryption (PKE) scheme having this property and proof of security under the standard assumptions. Finally, we combine puzzles with PKE schemes for enabling delayed decryption in applications such as e-auctions and e-voting. For this we first introduce the notion of effort-release PKE (ER-PKE), encompassing the well-known timedrelease encryption and encapsulated key escrow techniques. We then present a security model for ER-PKE and a generic construction of ER-PKE complying with our security notion.

Lessons from media reporting of natural disasters : a case study of the 2011 flash floods in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley

Practice-led journalism research techniques were used in this study to produce a ‘first draft of history’ recording the human experience of survivors and rescuers during the January 2011 flash flood disaster in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley in Queensland, Australia. The study aimed to discover what can be learnt from engaging in journalistic reporting of natural disasters. This exegesis demonstrates that journalism can be both a creative practice and a research methodology. About 120 survivors, rescuers and family members of victims participated in extended interviews about what happened to them and how they survived. Their stories are the basis for two creative outputs of the study: a radio documentary and a non-fiction book, that document how and why people died, or survived, or were rescued. Listeners and readers are taken "into the flood" where they feel anxious for those in peril, relief when people are saved, and devastated when babies, children and adults are swept away to their deaths. In undertaking reporting about the human experience of the floods, several significant elements about journalistic reportage of disasters were exposed. The first related to the vital role that the online social media played during the disaster for individuals, citizen reporters, journalists and emergency services organisations. Online social media offer reporters powerful new reporting tools for both gathering and disseminating news. The second related to the performance of journalists in covering events involving traumatic experiences. Journalists are often required to cover trauma and are often amongst the first-responders to disasters. This study found that almost all of the disaster survivors who were approached were willing to talk in detail about their traumatic experiences. A finding of this project is that journalists who interview trauma survivors can develop techniques for improving their ability to interview people who have experienced traumatic events. These include being flexible with interview timing and selecting a location; empowering interviewees to understand they don’t have to answer every question they are asked; providing emotional security for interviewees; and by being committed to accuracy. Survivors may exhibit posttraumatic stress symptoms but some exhibit and report posttraumatic growth. The willingness of a high proportion of the flood survivors to participate in the flood research made it possible to document a relatively unstudied question within the literature about journalism and trauma – when and why disaster survivors will want to speak to reporters. The study sheds light on the reasons why a group of traumatised people chose to speak about their experiences. Their reasons fell into six categories: lessons need to be learned from the disaster; a desire for the public to know what had happened; a sense of duty to make sure warning systems and disaster responses to be improved in future; personal recovery; the financial disinterest of reporters in listening to survivors; and the timing of the request for an interview. Feedback to the creative-practice component of this thesis - the book and radio documentary - shows that these issues are not purely matters of ethics. By following appropriate protocols, it is possible to produce stories that engender strong audience responses such as that the program was "amazing and deeply emotional" and "community storytelling at its most important". Participants reported that the experience of the interview process was "healing" and that the creative outcome resulted in "a very precious record of an afternoon of tragedy and triumph and the bitter-sweetness of survival".

Outsourcing data storage without outsourcing trust in cloud computing

The main theme of this thesis is to allow the users of cloud services to outsource their data without the need to trust the cloud provider. The method is based on combining existing proof-of-storage schemes with distance-bounding protocols. Specifically, cloud customers will be able to verify the confidentiality, integrity, availability, fairness (or mutual non-repudiation), data freshness, geographic assurance and replication of their stored data directly, without having to rely on the word of the cloud provider.

Indigenous knowledge and IP food security : a review of concepts and cases

Dáwat, Pamahándí, Tawíd, Ságda, Lampísa, Ibabások, Lapát, Panedlák: for most of us gathered here, these are words that we don’t usually use in our daily lives. Others may consider them as exotic, alien, funny and even backward. However, for indigenous kindred among us, these words denote an intimate identity and deep understanding of the world around them. It constitutes a broader knowledge system, be written or otherwise, which guides them in the management of resources within their ancestral land. This paper will provide a brief theoretical framework of the concepts of indigenous knowledge systems—hereinafter called IKS, and indigenous peoples food security, and hopefully a deeper or continued appreciation in the study of both concepts in general.

Security and privacy in eHealth : is it possible? A sociotechnical analysis

Advances in Information and Communication Technologies have the potential to improve many facets of modern healthcare service delivery. The implementation of electronic health records systems is a critical part of an eHealth system. Despite the potential gains, there are several obstacles that limit the wider development of electronic health record systems. Among these are the perceived threats to the security and privacy of patients’ health data, and a widely held belief that these cannot be adequately addressed. We hypothesise that the major concerns regarding eHealth security and privacy cannot be overcome through the implementation of technology alone. Human dimensions must be considered when analysing the provision of the three fundamental information security goals: confidentiality, integrity and availability. A sociotechnical analysis to establish the information security and privacy requirements when designing and developing a given eHealth system is important and timely. A framework that accommodates consideration of the legislative requirements and human perspectives in addition to the technological measures is useful in developing a measurable and accountable eHealth system. Successful implementation of this approach would enable the possibilities, practicalities and sustainabilities of proposed eHealth systems to be realised.

Accountable-eHealth systems : the next step forward for privacy

eHealth systems promise enviable benefits and capabilities for healthcare delivery. However, the technologies that make these capabilities possible introduce undesirable drawbacks such as information security related threats, which need to be appropriately addressed. Lurking in these threats are information privacy concerns. Addressing them has proven to be difficult because they often conflict with information access requirements of healthcare providers. Therefore, it is important to achieve an appropriate balance between these requirements. We contend that information accountability (IA) can achieve this balance. In this paper, we introduce accountable-eHealth (AeH) systems, which are eHealth systems that utilise IA as a measure of information privacy. We discuss how AeH system protocols can successfully achieve the aforementioned balance of requirements. As a means of implementation feasibility, we compare characteristics of AeH systems with Australia’s Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) sys-tem and identify similarities and highlight the differences and the impact those differences would have to the eHealth domain.